The notion that we hacks should be instinctually hostile to the powerful, blunt in our questions, unsparing in our challenges, rude in our inquiries, and uninterested in getting to know anyone in power - that we should be much more skeptical precisely because we are so close - this seems almost archaic in late-imperial DC. In my view, that's why the public has come to despise the press in a populist age. Because the public rightly sees us as part of the establishment problem, not a means to its accountability. (One reason the United States so easily became a nation of torture, for example, is because Washington journalists, again with certain glorious exceptions, could not bring themselves to think of their friends and sources as war criminals.)